"Music is the worst trade under the sun in a blow-up," he observed. "The lyre is only heard in feasts."
Dormer moved. "My dear fellow, you sound gloomy! The present is not a feast, granted, but neither is it a blow-up."
John Henry Newman said nothing, but, with a little sigh, laid the violin and the bow carefully on the window-seat. The fading light gleamed for a moment on his tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, and threw up, as he turned, the great nose and the rather prominent underlip of his lean face.
"I could wish, after all," he said, "that I had not fallen in with the Froudes' plan. I do not really want to leave England just now. I grudge the time, the expense, the trouble. Then suppose I were to fall ill, too. It is quite enough that Hurrell should be an invalid. And yet I suppose it may be a duty to consult for one's health, to enlarge one's ideas, to break one's studies, and to have the name of a travelled man."
"Yet a few weeks ago," commented Dormer, undisturbed, "you seemed pleased about it."
"So I was; in fact, the prospect fairly unsettled me. I remember feeling quite ashamed to be so excited, for it showed me how little real stability of mind I had yet attained.—But I shall go, of course, when term is over."
"It will do you good, now that the Arians are off your hands," said Dormer—"provided that you don't meet with a mishap like mine. Still more, must we hope, will it do Froude good."
"Indeed, we must hope that," answered Froude's friend very gravely, and in the darkening room the shadow of a great apprehension seemed to float for a moment between the two men.
"I wish I were not going to be away from England when the Reformed Parliament meets," resumed the silver-clear voice. "Reform apparently connoting nowadays change at any price, without regard to its direction, we need have no delusions that the threats against the Church which have been dinned into our ears for so long will not be put into execution. I know that Keble is preaching the duty of passivity for us clergy until the Liturgy itself is actually attacked, but if that is what he is waiting for, I don't think he will have to wait long. Revenues to-day, creeds to-morrow. I really incline to the hope that the Whig spirit will keep in, and the Church be set adrift. If this were the case we should be so very independent of things temporal, for we only, as individuals, should suffer."
"You will probably be confirmed in that hope, then," remarked his friend, "when you get abroad and see with your own eyes, as I did, the whole Western Catholic world suffering from the same lack of power because it has compromised with the State for the sake of its endowments."